Governance

Despite a long history of failed attempts at using DRM to control hardware products, Keurig has decided to employ DRM measures in their new coffee brewing machines that prevents the use of competing coffee pods. Coupled with a failure to clear previous, non-approved, Keurig-branded cups from store shelves before launching the product this was a […]

As a part of the effort by the Open Forum Europe to help European Union (EU) institutions live up to their commitments to the use of open document standards, fixmydocument.eu has been launched to give citizens a place to report problems with document compatibilities. In its short life, 51 web pages with more than 15,000 […]

The last decade of technological progression has witnessed major friction between the interests of organizations of centralized power and distributed networks of individuals. We are currently witnessing a dramatic transformation of social organization towards a new model that requires transparency, participation, and non-hierarchical collaboration. Eben Moglen delivers this keynote address at Linux Conf AU in […]

Digital rights champion, Cory Doctrow, has rejoined the EFF as part of an effort to eliminate the use of digital rights management (DRM) in modern technology. DRM locks down digital goods in an effort to stop digital piracy, but the increased security also results in lower quality products for consumers and slower innovation. Corynne McSherry, […]

There were quite a few major legal developments centered around open source in 2014, this post highlights the major events. Some major events include GPLv2 being tested in court, The EU Commission revising its policy to be more friendly towards open source, the founding of the core infrastructure initiative, and a handful of suits centered […]

The city of Munich in Germany hit the headlines last year when they revealed savings of more than $10 million after 10 years of migrating to open source software, including LibreOffice. Now, the city has their very own board member on the LibreOffice advisory board in order to give the city a voice in the […]

The nation of Uganda has reached 35 million people and the government has turned to free and open source software (FOSS) for electronic government services and platforms. The nation has done this to promote innovation, enable the development of customized services, and reduce costs. Open source has already been deployed in a few areas of […]

The Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) has joined the Open Source Initiative’s affiliate membership program. OSEHRA has a mission to build and support a vendor-neutral community for the creation, evolution, promotion, and support or open source health IT software, something that mirrors the directive of the OSI. More from the Open Source Initiative

In 2011, Bill 133 was passed in Quebec that requires government agencies to consider open source solutions when making IT decisions. Since then, companies like Red Hat, and Savoir-fair Linux, a consultancy firm that helps organizations switch to open source, have begun to become more deeply involved in the IT decisions of the Quebec government. […]

The Apache Software Foundation is celebrating their 15th year during ApacheCon Europe this week, and is recognizing the achievements the organizations has accomplished in that time. Apache powers nearly half of the Internet and includes a large number of companies including Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, GP, IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo. More from Global News Wire

The UK government has joined the likes of Canada, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Paraguay in committing to the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) which focuses on providing transparency in government contracting practices. The project plans to promote disclosure and participation in public contracting through an easy-to-understand data standard that is open and machine-readable. OCDS was […]

If you’ve been reading this site for any amount of time, it has probably started to become apparent that open source is hitting the mainstream in both development and usage. The US Government has even begun embracing open source wholly with 18F at the center of open source adoption. This trend has been a response […]

The Government of India recently announced a major effort to expand open source in the country’s governance. The government appears to be setting themselves up for success, at least initially, but there are still some major considerations that must come into effect if the government wants to achieve sustainable success. The government must also make […]

The European Parliament is seeking feedback on a study that links the use of open source software with government transparency. The study states that governments should be using open source and open standards to reduce vendor lock in and avoid giving dictatorial control to IT companies. The study is set to be published on November […]

The city of Berlin has chosen to switch back to using Microsoft Office rather than OpenOffice on 6,000 computers. The decision was made to improve document sharing with offices of the federal government and to eliminate issues some employees are having with the out dated version of OpenOffice they are using. More from Softpedia

The congressional budget office (CBO) is a nonpartisan group that rates the economic impact of many bills that pass through congress. The group uses complex algorithms and figures to calculate a score for each bill that represents how the law would effect the economy. This service is important to understanding the impact of legislation, but […]

Following the wake of Alice v. CLS Bank, the US Patent Office has more than tripled its software patent rejection rate. 24% of software patents were rejected by the office in January of this year, in July the rate rose to 78%. The ruling affected what are known as “business method” patents and essentially stated […]

Ben Balter is the Government Evangelist at GitHub, and a major part of his job has been expanding the understanding and use of open source inside the federal government. He has had two primary focal points during his tenure at GitHub. The first is to improve the culture and education of how governmental agencies get […]

The European Commission has just wrapped up the election of the new European Commissioners and Vice Presidents who will lead the activities of the Directorates General. Estonia prime minister Andrus Ansip has been named as the VP for Digital Single Market and Gunther Oettinger has been named Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society. Neither of […]

Open Knowledge and the Open Definition Advisory Council have announced the released of version 2.0 of the Open Definition, a set of principles that define openness as it relates to data and content. Many world governments have been launching open data initiatives across the globe, but doing so opens a new set of risks due […]

OST Original

I’ve spent the last couple of months working an internship for The Linux Foundation, doing research on new developments and adoption trends in the open source industry. If you have spent any amount of time reading about open source over the last year, you have probably heard about Docker; a lot of people are talking […]

Random Articles from the OST Archives

The government of India is implementing the National e-Governance Plan which seeks to make all government services available to the citizens through the use of information and communication technology. The government is working with the FUEL project, which offers linguistic resources to help translate and localize projects. These services help make technology more accessible to […]

Seth Vargo, an engineer at Chef, announced in a blog post he was leaving the company and the software development profession after receiving death threats from members of the Chef community. The dispute arose over Berkshelf, a tool that some users and contributors felt hampered their daily tasks. This highlights the challenges of managing an […]

A European Parliament study has recommended that the EU finance open source audits and bug bounties in order to improve privacy in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations. The study was led by a dozen European security experts and concluded “EU should promote and foster the development and usage of open protocols, open implementations and […]

Quote from Tech Crunch: The Linux Foundation is adding yet another foundation to its stable: the LF Deep Learning Foundation. The idea behind the LF Deep Learning Foundation is to “support and sustain open source innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning while striving to make these critical new technologies available to developers and data scientists everywhere.” The founding […]